A blog about random things and sometimes about my work translating and developing KDE and anything

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Poppler 0.18.0 released

Poppler 0.18.0 is here! It took 9 months and was delayed around 3 months because of my infamous laptop dead but I was finally able to release 0.18.0 today.

The changes are too big to explain in detail (12000 lines changed in 236 files) but I'll give a few highlights:
* General speed improvements
* Quaility and speed improvements in the Splash renderer (used by Okular)
* Quaility improvements in the Cairo renderer (used by Evince)
* Better Annotation support
* Better Form support
* Introduction of pdftocairo, a command line utility that uses the Cairo renderer to render pdf pages to png, etc.
* Introduction of pdfseparate, a command line utility that extracts pages of PDF files
* Introduction of pdfunite, a command line utility that can merges multiple PDF files into a single one
* Removal of pdftoabw as it was unmaintained
* Removal of the Qt3 frontend as it was unmaintained

You can have a look at the full changelog going to the Poppler releases page and having a look at the changes of 0.18.0, 0.17.4, 0.17.3, 0.17.2, 0.17.1 and 0.17.0

Nice work! Is it possible to include the functionality of pdfseparate in the poppler-qt4 library itself? I need such a feature for my application. I would also be happy to see Poppler::PSConverter be able to export to EPS, so I wouldn't need to use pdftops -eps for that anymore (and be able to remove the dependency on the poppler-utils package).

@ModernHacker: We only release source code, not builds, so you'll have to ask your distribution of choice

@Anonymous1: Great!

@The_User: Not having a laptop to do real work on it

@Xavi: Tx!

@Anonymous2: It is not on my list at the moment but since the functionality is there and you seem to be able to code I think it should not be that difficult for you writing the wrapping code for the qt4 frontend.

I got several hundreds of PDF documents (mostly scientific papers) stored, and I must say I am really glad Poppler 0.18 is out. Columns are better selected, subpixel hinting is working, and indeed speed has improved. Thank you all!